e-books

Adult content has long been a big draw, and one of the most profitable, in the world of digital media, but a recent move by PayPal is a sign of how one part of that business might be facing some problems up ahead.
Smashwords, an e-book distributor that competes with Amazon, has sent out a letter to the authors, publishers and literary agents that it works with to tell them that PayPal is… Read More

Last spring I wrote about Nature Publishing Group’s plan for a $49 electronic textbook packed with interactivity and unlimited content updates for life. The original publication date was scheduled for September 1, 2011, but for a variety of reasons the release was pushed back. Today marks the official launch of “Principles of Biology”.
This book is “born… Read More

Barnes & Noble may be challenging Amazon’s dominance of the e-book world, but the Kindle sales are still growing faster than the Nook’s — at least if you connect the dots between some of the numbers included in a recently-published article by The New York Times. Read More

Ownership of tablets and e-book readers saw a big spike over the holidays — in fact, it nearly doubled in the United States, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.
The study was based on telephone surveys conducted in mid-December and January, which found that ownership of both device types nearly doubled in just a month. Now a… Read More

Nobody wants to be told that their business model is obsolete. Ask Kodak. Or Hollywood. And the publishing industry is slower on its feet than most. Bookstores don’t want to believe that they’ll ultimately lose 75% of their pre-e-book business to that scourge plus Amazon delivery. (I’m assuming e-book market share will eventually plateau somewhere north of 50%.) Meanwhile… Read More

Right now, most e-books look an awful lot like their print counterparts, but startups like just-launched Coliloquy want to change that. In the past few months, other companies like Findings, Readmill, and Subtext have experimented with adding annotations and other social features to e-books. Coliloquy co-founder Lisa Rutherford said she wants to go further. Read More

Microsoft is officially putting their MS Reader system to bed. First made available in 2000, before e-ink readers were more than a twinkle in some materials researcher’s eye, the application was intended for the consumption of e-books on LCD screens, using Microsoft’s ClearType font smoothing and a relatively compact, familiar format.
The .lit filetype and Reader application have… Read More

Panasonic is prepping an Android 2.2-powered e-book reader/tablet hybrid [JP] that’s specifically designed for the Japanese market. The device will offer e-books through a store set up by Rakuten, the country’s biggest e-commerce company, with the initial line-up including a total of at least 10,000 titles. Read More

Nature, the folks who brought you the free life sciences learning community Scitable, are today announcing “Principles of Biology”, a college level electronic textbook. Building upon the cross-platform success of Scitable, the new textbook offers a variety of fully interactive features, including quizzes and assessments, an online gradebook for instructors, and more. Perhaps… Read More

A report from the Association of American Publishers reveals that e-books sales experienced “powerful continuing growth” as they colorfully put it, and paper books of all types dipped, compared to the same period (January-February) from last year. This isn’t surprising news, mainly because it isn’t news — and even if it were, it’s just history repeating… Read More

When Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2007, Fujitsu started showcasing the first version of its own e-book reader, the so-called FLEPia. Back then, Fujitsu marketed the FLEPia as the world’s first such device displaying pages in color. We covered the device a few times until it actually went on sale in Japan with a $1,200 price tag [JP] last year. Read More

The second author to reach 1 million Kindle books sold is…? Any guesses? Of course not; I gave it away in the headline. It’s James Patterson, author of such books as the Alex Cross series and Women’s Murder Club. That Morgan Freeman movie, Along Came a Spider, was based on an Alex Cross novel. Read More

How prescient! I just wrote that the dead-tree book is dying and a tipster sent us in this charming little site dedicated to the joy of paper – funded by a paper manufacturer, one of the biggest in the world.
Domtar is the “largest integrated producer of uncoated freesheet paper in North America and the second largest in the world based on production capacity” and business… Read More

While this blog post over at Tomorrow’s Book has more than a little bitterness to it, it’s also informative. More and more people are choosing to self-publish these days, and even if it’s a hassle, you’d think a new e-book store like Kobo would want to embrace this nascent business model. After all, if you cut out the middle men, you can get right to the chiseling. Read More

Toshiba and Japan’s second biggest mobile carrier KDDI announced [JP] the Biblio Leaf SP02 for the Japanese market yesterday, an e-reader that features a 6-inch monochrome screen (16 shades) with 800×600 resolution. The device has 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity and supports XMDF/PDF/EPUB files. Read More

Worldreader.org is a huge non-profit initiative, based out of Barcelona, Spain and founded by David Risher, former renown Amazon executive and Colin McElwee. It aims to use technology in order to bring “Books to All” in developing countries.
Today Worldreader.org announced another cool initiative. With the help of publishers like Ghana-based EPP, Sam Woode, and Woeli and other… Read More

Sharp isn’t the only Japanese company getting ready for the upcoming e-book wars. Tomorrow, Toshiba is throwing its hat into the ring. But unlike Sharp (which starts in Japan), Toshiba will offer e-books in the US first – with plans to expand to Japan, Europe, and other places later. Read More

Students have another choice when it comes to electronic textbooks. CourseSmart has released an iPad App, and the company says that 90 percent of the “core textbooks” out there are available. Read More